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January 05, 2007

First lawsuit filed against Duke

Clarice Feldman
A lacrosse player not indicted in the notorious case has filed the first of what may be a series of cases against Duke University. The local ABC Television affiliate writes:
Kyle Dowd filed the lawsuit Thursday against Duke University and visiting associate professor Kim Curtis. Dowd, who graduated with David Evans in May 2006, was not indicted in the rape case but says that Professor Curtis gave him and another lacrosse player in class a failing grade in class as a form of retaliation after the Duke Lacrosse scandal broke. The two players were apparently receiving passing grades until the scandal, and Duke University revised their grades upward months after graduation.

This does not affect the pending sexual offense and kidnapping case against David Evans, Reade Seligmann, and Collin Finnerty. But it is significant in being the first of likely to be many legal and moral hits against Duke University - critics say that Duke failed to stand by its own students as they came under attack by members of the faculty and community. [snip]

Duke is being sued for breach of contract and unjust enrichment. Curtis and Duke are being sued for fraud, negligent misrepresentation, intentional infliction of emotional distress, negligent infliction of emotional distress, negligence, and punitive damages. For all but one of those claims the lawsuit states that the plaintiffs were damaged in excess of $10,000. [Emphasis added]
As the article notes, Professor Curtis (a visiting assistant professor) was one of the 88 Duke University teachers who were signatories of the widely-publicized letter viciously attacking the team's players.

I'm beginning to think that universities are going to have to exercise a great deal more oversight over faculties or face some serious consequences. The Nifong-generated case -- and Duke's shocking response to it -- may well prove the undoing of a decades' long slide into which so many of university departments  have been captured by leftist demagogues who have not a single concern about the rights of their students.

K.C. Johnson writes in Durham in Wonderland:
Curtis is a political science professor whose most recent publication is on the politically correct topic of multicultural education. Over recent years, her behavior has been a caricature of an academic radical: shortly after 9/11, she wildly (and, of course, without any evidence) condemned an alleged attempt "to silence professors who encourage students to probe the history of U.S. foreign policy in the effort to understand the September 11th attacks." She protested efforts to remove from the ranks of the nation's faculty those "who feel shame, fear and anger over the violent suppression that the United States has undertaken in so many states across the globe in the near and the distant past"; and those who "feel distress over the long-time support by the U.S. of the mujahadeen in Afghanistan, whose oppression of women has been brutal."

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